Schools Panel Is No Threat to the Mayor’s Grip

In a nearly empty high school auditorium one evening last month, parents, teachers and cynics marched to the microphone, turned to the collection of volunteers derisively called the Panel for Educational Puppets, and began to scream.

A vocational school teacher in East New York, Brooklyn, accused bureaucrats of manipulating college enrollment data. Parents protested a plan to move their school to East Harlem from Midtown. And Olaiya Deen, the mother of a third grader, deplored the proliferation of charter schools and “Madison Avenue” marketing blitzes to promote them in her neighborhood.

“What happens if a majority of those charter schools fail — where will these low-income children now go?” cried Ms. Deen. Then she stopped, and blurted: “I don’t know why I’m speaking to you guys, because if you guys have any dissent, you’re not going to be sitting there tomorrow.”

It is a ritual that unfolds monthly around the city at each meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, the oversight group that replaced the independent Board of Education when the State Legislature handed New York’s mayor control of its sprawling school system in 2002.

In designing the mayoral takeover, lawmakers viewed the panel as critical to maintaining a “balance of authority,” and promised it would have a “meaningful role” on citywide education policy and approve major contracts, according to the authorizing language that accompanied the bill.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — who controls 8 of the panel’s 13 seats — made plain during the negotiations that he preferred no panel at all, and over the past seven years, he and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who doubles as the panel’s chairman, have eased it into irrelevance.

The volunteer panelists — an investment banker, a lingerie store owner and an expert on electromagnetics among them — rarely engage in discussions with those who rise to address them. They do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff. Some have barely uttered a public word during their tenures.

Edison O. Jackson, president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, has missed 15 of the 27 meetings held since he joined the panel in 2007; over all, the mayor’s appointees have an attendance rate of 75 percent.

The board has cast 98 votes over 79 meetings — the vast majority of them unanimous. It has never rejected an administration proposal.

The most contentious discussion came in 2004, over the mayor’s plan to hold back third graders who scored poorly on standardized tests, and resulted in the ouster of three dissenting members in what is known in education lore as the Monday Night Massacre.

“When people say, ‘How could you have devised a system that gave total authority and absolute autonomy to the mayor?’ My answer to them is, ‘Well, we didn’t,’ ” said former Assemblyman Steven Sanders, who was chairman of the Education Committee at the time the change was made and now is lobbying for major changes in mayoral control for the New York State School Boards Association.

“It was supposed to provide a place where there would be real vetting of important issues, where there would be meaningful dialogue and debate and a vote that was not predetermined,” Mr. Sanders said. “It is certainly clear to anyone who looks at the system that that is not the case.”

Now, as the Legislature considers whether to extend mayoral control, which expires in June, the panel’s composition and role are crucial elements in the debate. People who feel shut out of decision-making want to make it a hedge against the mayor’s power, something the Bloomberg administration sees as erasing the very essence of mayoral control.

Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, has proposed fixed terms and a chairman other than the chancellor. William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller — and mayoral candidate — suggested an advisory board to nominate candidates for the mayor to choose from, a system used in Boston and Cleveland. The teachers’ union would give the public advocate, the comptroller and the speaker of the City Council seats.

The mayor, however, would sooner disband the central board altogether — as Washington, D.C., did in 2007 — than tinker with its composition. He and Chancellor Klein say that an independent school board would only bring back political infighting and chaos.

“We don’t want to create all these layers of checks and balances,” explained Dennis M. Walcott, the deputy mayor who oversees education, who described the three decades of school board rule as “dancing to multiple masters.”

“When the mayor knows it’s time to make a decision, it’s time to make a decision,” added Mr. Walcott. “And he’s the one who should be held accountable.”

As the nation’s cities increasingly turn to their mayors to run public schools — an approach the Obama administration strongly endorses — experts on school governance differ on the appropriate role for a school board.

“The challenge is to reform mayoral control in a way that doesn’t lose the coherence, but does ensure more opportunity for transparency and tough-minded debate,” explained Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Thomas L. Alsbury, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, said boards controlled by mayors may improve efficiency, but can have “a chilling effect on the function of democracy and the control of our schools from the local citizenry.”

But Kenneth K. Wong, director of the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown University, said it “doesn’t make sense for the mayor to appoint only a minority of the school board,” noting that “the reason why we have mayoral control is because there has been a circle of blame.”

Photo

The Panel for Educational Policy, which meets one evening a month, in February at Long Island City High School in Queens.Credit
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

At a City Hall ceremony inaugurating New York’s panel in July 2002, Mayor Bloomberg said he viewed it as a sounding board — but advised members not to share their views with reporters. “They don’t have to speak, and they don’t have to serve,” he warned. “That’s what serving ‘at the pleasure’ means.”

Three of the 12 current panel members declined to be interviewed for this article: Mr. Jackson, David C. Chang and Richard L. Menschel. One other, Marita Regan, did not return repeated telephone and e-mail messages over several weeks.

In retrospect, some panel members say that the mayor’s admonition against talking to reporters was an early inkling that he viewed the panel as a rubber stamp. A much less subtle sign came in March 2004, when hundreds packed a high school auditorium in Manhattan for the panel vote on the proposal to hold back third graders who scored poorly on standardized tests. On stage, the nameplates of the ousted members were replaced with pieces of paper scribbled with the names of their successors.

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(The mayor filled two of the seats with high-ranking city officials: Alan D. Aviles, who was then general counsel of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Tino Hernandez, then the chairman of the Housing Authority.)

“It was so stunning, it was so direct,” recalled Augusta Souza Kappner, the former president of Bank Street College of Education, who was the only mayoral appointee to oppose the plan and keep her seat (she has since left the panel). “There are not many instances when you see a very public naked use of power.”

Susana Torruella Leval, an arts consultant who said she joined the panel reluctantly only upon Mr. Bloomberg’s personal prodding, had been barraged with phone calls from education officials in the days leading up the meeting. Once her skepticism over holding third graders back became clear, she was ordered to fax her resignation.

“After being told my opinion counted and they wanted my opinion,” she said in a recent interview, “it turned out they didn’t really.”

Mr. Bloomberg was unapologetic. “Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much,” he told reporters after the meeting. “They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.”

The business of a local school board is rarely captivating, but the panel’s monthly meetings, at 6 p.m. one Monday a month, are an exercise in impotence.

The administration has interpreted narrowly the Legislature’s instruction that the panel approve “any contracts that would significantly impact the provision of educational services.”

The Department of Education executes thousands of contracts every year, yet the panel has voted on contracts only 33 times in its life, and they were mainly labor agreements. It had no say, for example, on the $80 million data system the city bought in 2007; a 2003 agreement to give Snapple exclusive vending rights in schools; or the 2006 hiring of Alvarez & Marsal, a management consulting firm, to find savings in the budget.

Similarly, the Department of Education has not forwarded internal misconduct reports to the panel for review, a role for the school board under city law.

At the March meeting, at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, the lone vote was on a labor contract with a theatrical stage union that affected six people. It passed unanimously. (Since 2002, there have been 17 panel votes that had dissenters; eight had only one.)

The bulk of the meeting was taken up with a PowerPoint presentation on college enrollment and Chancellor Klein’s beaming review of President Obama’s education speech.

Despite the dearth of debate and the lopsided votes, several panel members — who receive $50 for travel to each meeting and $500 a year for supplies — said they thought their contributions had helped shape policy.

Philip A. Berry, a panelist who runs a management consulting firm, said, for example, that panel members’ urging that school report cards be presented in a more accessible way had led the Department of Education to rethink its approach. Mr. Berry could not recall ever having disagreed with the mayor, but attributed that to shared ideology.

“I’ve never felt that it’s just a rubber stamp for every decision that comes up,” Mr. Berry said. “But our job is not to get a policy so tied up in the political battle that you’re not able to improve the situation for children.”

Patrick J. Sullivan, who was tapped by the Manhattan borough president to join the panel in 2007, said that he found a “very distressing” scene of “members sitting there not asking any questions, the D.O.E. presenters droning on and on.”

He has become a persistent, often lonely, voice of opposition, pushing for access to internal misconduct investigations and review of large contracts, like the $55 million the city paid a Virginia company to overhaul the tracking of information about disabled students. During an October presentation on testing, Mr. Sullivan challenged the architect of the school’s accountability system, James S. Liebman.

“I don’t think you even grasp enough about statistics to have this conversation,” he told Mr. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia. “I don’t think you’re qualified to do this job.”

Mr. Sullivan is not naïve about his role. “Everyone knows that even if there’s some lively debate, it’s not going to change the outcome of the issue,” he said. “The public knows that the panel does not serve as any type of check or balance.”

Between sessions, Mr. Klein sometimes fields questions from panel members via e-mail, and other officials have provided the occasional briefing on budgets or the school-grading system. Asked for an example of when the opinions of panel members had shaped his views, Mr. Klein pointed to a 2003 straw poll on whether to allow cellphone antennas to be built on top of schools: he decided against it after the panel criticized the idea.

“People say, you know, there’s no input,” the chancellor said last month. “There’s plenty of input. But some people want the power to push a different agenda. That’s the antithesis of mayoral control. That’s a prescription for paralysis.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Debate Over Schools, Panel Is No Threat to the Mayor’s Grip. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe